Due January 30 CS 4455 - Video Game Design & Programming Spring 2006
Assignment 1: Critique of Game Engine
Individual assignment
Provide constructive criticism of a game engine. Your assignment should be submitted on the class coweb here. You should choose an engine to review as soon as possible, and add your name to the list of folks reviewing that engine on the coweb page. Only three people are allowed to review each engine, so the sooner you make your choice, the more likely you are to be able to review the engine you choose.
The purpose of this exercise is two-fold: to require each student to look deeply at at least one complex video-game engine, and to provide a resource that the whole class can use to determine which engine they might want to use.
Due on January 30th.
Please create a swiki page for your critique and link it off the assignment page. Your critique should be submitted in HTML on the swiki, and should be as long as it needs to be to cover the details you feel are important. You should summarize the features of the engine such that you provide the kind of information someone like you (a student in a video games class, or some considering building a game) could judge the suitability of the engine for their needs. Thus, you should include things like:
- major capabilities of the engine, including both core features and community contributions
- missing features commonly found in other engines
- other pros and cons
- the kinds of games it is aimed at
- the size of the community using it
- number of commercial or non-commercial games
Obviously, this is not an exhastive list.
Your critique will be graded on:
- Insight into game-design needs
- Insight into technical issues
- Completeness of your critique
- Quality of your writing